I have never following Peter's suggestion about keeping Raw files in a different folder from the derivatives. (BTW, I use LIghtroom on a MacPowerBook Pro) I suppose I fear that I will want to add more keywords or captions later and it would just be easier to have them side-by-side. Can anyone talk me out of this? I could change if it seemed easy.

-- at what point do the DNGs or RAWs go their own way? AS on p135, I'm assuming I'd export the one I needed to work on as a derivative to that "derivative" folder, If guess I would do the Lightroom adjustments first in the raw folder-- or would I dupe it and temporarily move it to the derivative folder so I can quickly archive the rest of the photos . (Which raises the question -- can you duplicate a file in LIghtroom? Hmm...I never tried that--would that be an export as an 'original'.), When I'm done with the job, I presume I'd move it to the blue raw "archive" and the derivatives to their own archive.

I also suppose that I'd have to be careful to keep the same or similar file names.

Sorry to still be asking these questions. I'm a slow learner...Mary

P.S. that's all the questions for today -- I've used up my quota in every category!

It varies. Some people import as DNG and say goodbye to the RAWs at that point. My preference is to work on the RAWs until that I feel that shoot is "finished" - roughly the point at which I decide I'm not going to delete any more. I then create the DNGs, save metadata back to the RAWs and archive them.

It is easier to apply metadata later if derivatives - TIF and PSD files - are in subfolders with the RAWs/DNGs. I just prefer to separate them into their own buckets and folders in the same way as Peter. Having them in different folders doesn't really matter - at that later point I'll probably find the pictures not by going through the folders but by using a smart collection that might look for images shot in certain locations, or in a certain timeframe, or with xyz in any searchable metadata etc. So being in different folders isn't that much of a pain.